


strung with subtle-colored hair

by oriflamme



Series: stand still stay silent [5]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: (By Emil's Unaware Vaguely Neglectful Father), Body Dysphoria, Food Issues, M/M, Misgendering, No Hotakainen Is Neurotypical, Trans Male Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 00:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20380936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: Lalli takes after Ensi, from the ice of his eyes to the way his hair falls in straight sheaves down his back. His mother braids it back for him in a fishtail, humming cheerfully, so that it won't be in the way while he and Grandma scout the silent forests for the next two months.





	strung with subtle-colored hair

Lalli takes after Ensi, from the ice of his eyes to the way his hair falls in straight sheaves down his back. The grey in Ensi's hair makes it only a half a shade off from the way it used to be. His mother braids it back for him in a fishtail, humming cheerfully, so that it won't be in the way while he and Grandma scout the silent forests for the next two months.

It still does, though. When they get back, Lalli bristles and fidgets all through Tuulikki combing the knots and twigs out. She hugs him proudly, pats his head, and sends him on his way.

Grandma never has problems like this.

He watches, and waits, and pokes Onni in the side when he's in the middle of hacking his own hair short again by the creek bed. "Little critter," Onni says, exasperated. But Lalli pulls his braid out to the side pointedly, and Onni studies his face and sobers. "This won't be even," he warns, as if things like that matter. Lalli bats the knife away when Onni makes a move to hack off the hair framing his face and darts away. If Onni tried to cut his bangs like their fathers', it would look weird.

"You're welcome!" Onni calls after him.

But Onni is also the first one to adjust, seamless, when Jukka introduces Lalli as his daughter to visitors and Lalli just says, "No," and tunes them out. He takes Tuuri aside when she won't stop asking why.

His mother fixes his hair with scissors so that it's even, since that's a boring thing that matters to adults. "Don't let your cousin cut your hair with a knife, my little Lalli-lullukka," she teases as she tweaks his nose. His mother is always as happy as Onni and Tuuri's is distantly, faintly sad, no matter what.

There's not a lot of formality to it. Pronouns don't have gender in Finnish. Most of his clothes are already scout's stuff, long sleeves and gloves and boots and tunics cut to be comfortable to run in, stitched with the assumption that he'll grow up as rail-thin and lean as Ensi over the years to come. He never wore any of the hand-me-downs from Tuuri, anyway; most of them didn't fit right or had fabric that felt weird, but mostly it's not something he cares about.

Ensi merely ruffles his hair with a faint, crooked smile, and says nothing. She corrects the other scouts and troll hunters, brisk and to the point, until it becomes common knowledge that her grandsons are her apprentices.

-

Records in Keuruu are more formal. Lalli can't remember much from quarantine or processing - he's empty, inside and out, a few months that he remembers only in distant blinks - but he remembers Onni finishing the paperwork for him. The only parts that he coaxes Lalli through, his voice rough and croaky from crying through the nights, are the name and the gender marker.

Lalli doesn't care. A lot of things don't matter right now. He taps beside the M and ducks his head again, kicking his legs as Onni turns to deal with Tuuri next.

His name is his name.

-

("Tuuri. Tell him he's not allowed to have a braid," Lalli insists, squinting in disdain. "It was mine first."

Tuuri refuses, on the grounds that that would be rude and ridiculous. Like many of Tuuri's jokes, it doesn't make sense.)

-

("Onni. Tell him," Lalli tries. In dreams, language is irrelevant, but he refuses to acknowledge that. It's the principle of the thing.

Onni turns to Reynir. "It's true.")

\---

"You look more like Helga every year, Emile," Torolf Västerström says, absently, the last time he ever looks Emil in the eye. It's one of the scattered, infrequent moments when his father has time to speak to him in passing.

(Emil's not sure why Torolf even bothers repeating it. It's fairly obvious every time that that fact makes him less inclined to look at Emil.)

Emil's been Emil for a while. Not like anyone other than his nanny or the tutors cares. He has to remind Father every time he visits.

He only remembers her vaguely. The pictures of her around the house are the only reason he has a clear idea of what her face looked like, and Emil knows he doesn't really look like her. He has the Västerström nose, which tends to be a rather decisive factor. Their hair is similar. Helga kept it long, in butter-curls around her shoulders, even as her long sickness hollowed her out and left her tired before the day was half over. She'd touch his cheek once after the nanny ushered him in to say good morning, and then they'd tell him she needed to rest.

In the end, they simply left Emil at home in the care of his nanny while her final hospital stay passed.

There are no pictures at all in here. Only charts and heavy bookshelves. It's kept locked whenever Father's not home, which is most days.

"Emil, father," Emil says, raising his chin proudly. But Torolf has already bent his head back to his work with a preoccupied nod, dismissing him.

-

After the fire - after everything falls out from under them, and they're left scraping up whatever dignity is left to them after the money's gone - Emil can't bury things anymore. With no one being paid to care about him anymore, no one really does. He can't wrap his body in neat, expensive jackets and vests and layers anymore and pretend that he likes anything about the way he feels, physically. He can't afford hormones from Iceland anymore, either, and when he tries to ready himself for school in the mirror in the cramped apartment bathroom, he almost sourly thinks that they never did him much good at all. He's not practiced enough at doing his own hair and ablutions to deal with it. He just feels - dispirited.

But then he joins the cleanser unit. They don't have standards, but they do require a certain standard for physical fitness if you want to live, and he is agonizingly aware of how the other recruits - some as young as thirteen - snicker behind his back any time he reveals some loathsome new ignorance.

And Emil _wants _to demolish things with a passion he's never felt before. He wants to make something of himself and escape the dull, crushing grind academia has turned out to be. He wants his body to feel like his own, for the first time in his life.

It's not like they can afford the kind of meals Emil's body was used to anymore. Once he starts working to keep up with the rest of the cleanser recruits, he drops weight in a sharp, unforgiving way that Siv and Torbjörn never quite comment on, and replaces it with muscle. He levels out, but there are parts of himself that are fundamental - wider hips, his chest - and they're the parts that_ matter_, but they don't go away.

Swedish binders are, thankfully, some of the finest in the known world. He has it professionally fitted and everything to prevent any discomfort or unsightly physical damage. It's still Emil alone in the degradingly small apartment bathroom mirror, but he smooths his hair into place with a pleased smirk.

-

The problem is, in the explosives squads, you only have to be fit enough to get clear of the demolition zone. Not all of the weight he dropped was useful, or healthy, or even intentional. Emil _mastered _the art of dramatically brooding to cover up the fact that he's wheezing a little after a long day.

Mikkel corners him on the first night of the expedition. In hindsight, winding up out of breath after climbing a hill no one else had trouble with may have been excessive. "I understand. However, I suspect that you did not read the safety instructions. Strenuous physical activity will still cause shortness of breath and light-headedness, particularly if you've been wearing it all day, and you can afford neither in dangerous environs like these," he says.

He has a point. The safety instructions had been…skimmed. He also has a rather ominous pair of scissors.

Emil doesn't have to like it. Even after he pouts and pulls on a compression shirt under his thermal, he still can barely keep up with Sigrun.

But it's easier to breathe. Under their heavy uniform coats, with no mirrors, he can hardly tell the difference anyway. After a while, he's almost comfortable with himself in a way he's never felt before. The silent world is terrifying, but Sigrun doesn't treat him like he's stupid when they're out in the field and he doesn't know what to do with himself. Growth feels like stretching a cramped limb, but it's less of an imposition on his pride out here. He doesn't have to posture (as much) to make himself feel like somebody. It's…nice.

It's still unsanitary. He's never felt grimier in his _life_. If he thought the apartment shower was bad, it was heavenly bliss compared to the tank. The most robust cleaning system out here is the hose Mikkel uses to spray Lalli down when protocol calls for full decontamination. Mikkel briskly puts Emil in charge of making sure Lalli gets clean properly in the leaking tub after while his drenched uniform hangs out to dry, and Emil complies before his brain can question whether this is even part of his job description.

Lalli doesn't have these problems.

Lalli is all angles and lean muscle, rawboned and wiry in a way where absolutely nothing goes to waste and nothing is held in reserve. He folds his arms over his chest and scrunches his eyes shut as Mikkel hoses him down, shivering and bristling in the chill morning air as the tub of hot water leaks as fast as they filled it, and if Emil weren't paying attention - because he pays attention to Lalli, drawn in a way he doesn't have words for - he'd miss it completely. Emil's first instinct is to wash Lalli's hair properly, the way he's always done his, but there's absolutely no way. Lalli endures the entire thing with a grimace at the cold, and otherwise seems utterly unselfconscious about his body. Emil hurries to wrap him in the towel when the water finishes leaking. The ground is pure mud by this point, and he hastily throws the towel on the ground while Lalli dresses so Lalli can tug on his socks and dart into the tank without tracking it everywhere.

Lalli twitches when people yell, can't stand certain textures to the point he flinches, reacts badly when everyone around him fails to pick up on the warning signs - but he's at home in himself in a way Emil has never been.

It is the least Emil can do to take care of Lalli's boundaries, when no one else seems to recognize them. It's something Emil had to teach himself deliberately, after a childhood of stunted empathy; it requires work.

They can't even speak the same language. Somehow Emil's willing to invest more of himself in this friendship - stumbling through Finnish, caring with a kind of desperation that feels terrifying - than he has anything else in his life.

-

"The plan isn't to just keep running through the night, right? It is, isn't it?! I told you, I'm not capable of doing that!" Emil exclaims.

He's not even wearing a binder anymore, these days. Lalli is just a ridiculously efficient runner. Lalli is also flat as a board, and not allowed to judge Emil for this.

(Lalli also can't understand him anymore. With an incredulous look, Lalli vomits in Finnish.)

\---

In dreams, you're yourself. How you picture yourself, how you look in the real world, how you truly _are_ \- sometimes there's a difference that shakes out in dreams.

For Lalli there isn't. Sometimes his face looks younger in the water of Onni's space, his eyes just a little too vulnerable in the reflection. Onni's sadness sometimes seeps into his rocky, forested landscape when his form can't contain it, because Onni has sunk a lot of himself and his power into his space's defenses, and the sadness runs deep in his bones.

Emil makes things weird. He's not a mage, not as lucid. His subconscious retreated to the same dream memory every night, and in it his body reverted back to how he looked then. When they dream about Lalli's childhood, even further back, Emil declares it a nightmare. Emil doesn't seem to like it or be able to control it, even after he wakes up a little more.

But sometimes Emil is himself, and it requires careful study. When they meet on the fishing dock, in the weird dreams that layer over Lalli's normal mage space, Emil is five centimeters taller than Lalli instead of one shorter, hips perceptibly narrower, jaw and throat more defined. When he's at ease with himself, he relaxes more, some of Sigrun's stance in the set of his shoulders.

It doesn’t matter to Lalli. It matters to Emil. Lalli mulls this over. It seems important enough to tuck away in the oddly deep well of observations about Emil that he's gathered, almost without realizing it.

-

Lalli wakes up and blinks, blearily, when Emil retrieves his jacket. When they fell asleep on the couch in front of the fire, Emil in the middle of carding his fingers through Lalli's hair, Lalli was using it as a blanket instead of the crocheted quilt. It was comfortable and warm. Now Lalli's head is cushioned by a pillow instead of Emil's stomach, and Emil is taking away the coat that smells like him.

This is deeply unfair. Lalli whines, burying his face in the pillow as he stretches and tries to get comfortable again.

Another sweater drapes over him with great care. It's not the same - but it's one of Emil's, the one Reynir's mother embroidered as gifts for all her house guests. Lalli experimentally tugs the sleeve so it covers his own. It's not a substitute for the real thing though, and when Emil starts to straighten up Lalli snags the hem of his shirt before he can get away. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I need to go on my shift," Emil says, in an anxious whisper. He smooths Lalli's hair out of his face. "Try to go back to sleep."

Dumb. It's not something to sound anxious about. Lalli grumbles and cracks one eye all the way open as he tugs on Emil's shirt again. "Mnh. Kiss," he mumbles. It's in Finnish, but Emil knows that one. Even when Lalli can barely string syllables together.

Emil's anxious look melts into a smile that is hopelessly tender. Lalli's never quite sure how he merits that kind of smile. But Emil obliges - he aims for the cheek, which is a safer bet, and Lalli twists his head so that the kiss presses against his mouth. Emil's too smart these days to kneel on the side of the couch for a better angle, though. Lalli got too obvious about using that as leverage to pin Emil under him and keep him there with a better distraction.

Sigrun wasn't actually mad about him being late; Lalli's pretty sure that was a cheer and a whistle, not a reprimand. But Emil spent most of the day bright red, and Lalli hasn't gotten another chance since.

Ah, well. Work routine is important. Emil presses his forehead against Lalli's before he pulls away, and that lingers even when Emil has to go.

**Author's Note:**

> "This is face-cancer again, isn't it," Emil says.  
Mikkel smiles ruefully. "Two young men of your particular configuration cannot, in fact, get pregnant," he agrees, without batting an eye.  
Emil is, in fact, quite sure that they can.  
Mikkel has a great deal of explaining to do.


End file.
